Mandatory Field Trip To The Cape Cod Canal

SANDWICH – An impressive discovery of a rock chair along the shores of the Cape Cod Canal was made by two nine-year-old girls from Dennis on Saturday afternoon.

Bridget Brochu and Nerys Nelson yelled, “Rock chair!” and then they ran to sit in the once hidden, then obvious chair made of rocks. They held the wild flowers they had picked along the canal. Fishermen fished off the rocks. A yellow boat went by.

Bridget Brochu and Nerys Nelson, both 9, of Dennis, relax in their newly-discovered “rock chair” along the Cape Cod Canal.

A mom, her truck, her two kids and their two friends. If this sounds like a commercial for a mandatory Saturday afternoon road trip to the Cape Cod Canal, it’s because it looked like one.

According to Julie Brochu, of Dennis, she started her Saturday field trip with her two children and their two friends, Nerys Nelson, 9, of Dennisport, and Caleb Fernandes, 12, of South Yarmouth, by taking them to pick apples and pumpkins at Crow Farm in Sandwich. “They didn’t know where we were going,” she said.

After each kid picked out a pumpkin and they got enough apples to feed them for a month, the kids were ready to go home, said Julie, whose husband, Aaron, owns the Big Rock Oyster Company. “But I said, ‘No, no, no – we’ve got one more mandatory field trip. We’re going to the canal.’ Once we got here, they were fine.”

“It’s just beautiful,” said Bridget as she clutched her cluster of wild flowers. “You can see all the boats going by, and you could fall off the rocks into the water and kill yourself somehow, so that’s exciting.”

Her brother, Adam, 11, explained he could build a replica of the Cape Cod Canal on a video game and then added, “This is way better than the video game Minecraft. I had a great day here. It’s been pretty fun. It’s so bright, it’s hard to see the power plant, but the power plant isn’t really that beautiful.”

“It’s cool. We get to go on the rocks, see all the boats,” said Nerys. “We walked around to see what kind of flower we could get.”

She and Bridget sat in the rock chair and they smiled. An impressive discovery indeed.

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Cape Cod Wave

Cape Cod Wave is an online magazine covering the character and culture of Cape Cod. We feature long-form journalism, slices of Cape Cod life, scenic slide shows, and music videos of local bands playing original music.